When I set out to write a novel for practice (figuring that that was really the only way to learn how), the first question in my mind was (unsurprisingly), ‘What shall I write?’
I read everything (and lots of it …), but perhaps more crime/mystery novels than other genres. Still … mysteries have plots. I wasn’t sure I could do that, so decided to try something easier. And, of all the genres available, historical fiction seemed the easiest. I was, after all, an Assistant Research Professor (in the biological sciences[1], but outside a lab, research is research); I had access to a large university library, and also the International Library Loan system.
‘It seems easier to look things up than make them up,’ I reasoned, ‘and if I turn out to have no imagination, I can steal things from the historical record.’
So, the next question was, of course, which bit of history did I want to use? I mean, there’s a terrible lot of it, much of it horrifying (which would certainly make for a good story) and almost all of it interesting. So, I tossed the possibilities around in my head while doing my job at the University, driving to and fro, shopping for groceries and talking to small children (my children were six, four and two when I began writing Outlander. When someone at his preschool asked my four-year-old son what his Mommy did, he replied cautiously, ‘Well, she looks at her computer a lot.’)
What would it be? The American Civil War? (boiling with conflict – and I did know that conflict is necessary for a good story.)[2] Venice under the Borgias? (plots, plagues, poison – what’s not to like?) Nineteenth Century Convicts in Australia? (I mean, not only transportation, shackles, starvation and cruelty, but aboriginal beliefs, kangaroos and wombats!)
Completely spoilt for choice, I just went on thinking of this and that during my weekly routine. People often ask me how I manage to do all the various things I do do, to which my stock reply is ‘I don’t do housework and I don’t watch television.’ That saves a lot of time. However, there was – at this particular time in my life – one exception to the television exclusion: on Saturday afternoons the family would watch Doctor Who on public television, and I always joined them, because the show was exactly the right length of time for me to do my nails.
Now, Doctor Who is a very long-running series, and we were – at the time – watching re-runs of the second Doctor, played by Patrick Troughton. In the particular storyline we were following, the Doctor (who picks up companions from various times in Earth’s history) had picked up a young Scotsman, from 1746 – a young man who appeared in his kilt.
‘Well, that’s rather fetching,’ I thought. Sufficiently so that I found myself still thinking about it next day in church (I don’t claim Divine Revelation, but I was in church). And I thought, ‘Well, you want to write a book and it doesn’t really matter where you set it; the important thing is to pick a place and start. OK, then, Scotland, eighteenth century.’
So that’s how I began, knowing nothing about Scotland or the eighteenth century, having no plot, no outline and no characters – only the vague but interesting vision of a Man in a Kilt. (Which is – I think all readers will agree – a very powerful and compelling image.)
On Monday morning, I took a mid-morning break from my work and stepped over to the main University Library, where I went to the lately-electronified card catalog and typed, ‘Scotland, Highlands, Eighteenth Century’ into the search box. I was given thirty-eight references, all with similar call numbers, so I went to the stacks where those call numbers were located – and there I found more than 400 books on Scotland: geography, history, costume, language… I picked out an armful of the most interesting-looking books and happily toted them back to my office, where I began reading them in the interstices of phone calls and coding (at this phase of my career, I was writing FORTRAN programs to analyze the contents of bird gizzards – don’t ask …).
So I began, reading everything I could get my hands on about Scottish history (of the eighteenth century, particularly; there’s a LOT of Scottish history, the Scots having been literate for a very long time) – with a particular emphasis on novels written by Scots. That’s where I learned the patterns of Scots speech, which I knew I would need.
Distinctive speech (speaking generally) is a matter of vocabulary, idiom, syntax and accent.
Scots has a distinct vocabulary separate from standard English, and a well-established separate idiom, plus identifiable differences of sentence structure. At the same time, most English-speakers can still understand it, with greater or lesser degrees of difficulty.
So getting to grips with Scots was a matter of vocabulary, idiom, and sentence structure, while accent is more just a matter of pronunciation and emphasis. For example:
New York: Har ya?
Georgia: Hah YEW?
Missouri: How ARE ya?
Minnesota: HOW’r YOO?
See? They’re all saying exactly the same thing, word-wise (and with the same social intent), even though it would sound quite different to a listener. You pretty much have to resort to phonetic spellings if you want to portray a distinct accent, because pronunciation and emphasis are the only real differences between accents; the words and basic structures are the same.
The main drawback to portraying accents in this way is that ‘eye’ spellings (as they’re called) can be a real pain to read, especially ones that involve lots of apostrophes. And I wouldn’t, for instance, use emphasized words (as I did in the example) in speech, because they’re distracting and draw attention to the fact that this is words-on-a-page, whereas what you want is to have the reader hear what the characters are saying.
You can get around this difficulty in part by using allusive language to describe the accent (‘He drawled,’ ‘She spoke in staccato bursts, spattering t’s and k’s like machine-gun fire,’ ‘His accent, usually faint, became more sibilant under the stress of agitation’) and give brief examples as authorial asides, filtered through your point of view character.
Dialect, though, you can do without ‘eye’ spellings, or using them only minimally. To do this, though, you have to be able to pick up the basic conventions of the dialect and have a good grip on characteristic idiom and some vocabulary. The main difficulty here is walking the line between comprehensibility (if you assume that most readers won’t be familiar with a lot of the words you’re using) and jamming unfamiliar terms down the readers’ throats or sticking them in awkwardly.
I got an approximation of Scots (which itself has lots of regional variation) from a number of different sources: I read novels and stories written by Scots (all kinds of novels; even if a book wasn’t set in Scotland or didn’t deal with Scottish characters, a native Scot will very often have rhythms and structures that an English writer doesn’t), and those written by English people, but set in Scotland (because ‘outside’ authors would be doing the same thing I was – trying to reproduce the local speech – and I could see how they did it and whether it worked), I watched BBC productions of anything British (and had fun picking out accents), and I bought every recording I could find that had traditional Scottish songs and ballads, especially live recordings (because the band members not only sing, they talk to each other and to the audience between numbers, and this informal banter is often helpful). I also rounded up a Scots Thesaurus and a couple of Scots/English dictionaries, which were good for vocabulary, though they don’t tell you anything about idiom or structure.
Now, the form of Scots that I use in Outlander is not any kind of a direct approximation; it’s an adaptation, or as you might say, an evocation. I relied mostly on the characteristic sentence structure, with the occasional idiom or striking word, and gave it a very light accent that used an easy eye-spelling, but no apostrophes. (For example, Scottish characters say things like ‘dinna’ and ‘couldna,’ which flow easily over the eyeballs, but give you a rough approximation of the light way Scots touch the word ‘no/not’ in speaking. On the other hand, they say things like, ‘Gie’ me that, or I’ll no answer for the consequences,’ more rarely. (And I don’t use the ‘no’ form for ‘not’, because to hear it, there’s no difference between ‘no’ and ‘no’, and the apostrophes all over the place are distracting.)
I also read a number of Really Horrible Examples of people trying to write ‘a Scottish accent,’ too. Mostly historical romance novels set in Scotland. What these authors were doing was writing straight English dialogue, and then altering the spelling of characteristic ‘accent’ words like ‘you/ye,’ sticking in the occasional word of Scots here and there. It doesn’t work all that well.
Now, as to vocabulary – that’s where this book comes in. I culled a number of fascinating Scots words from my reading material, but also – as my efforts and acquaintance expanded – I was also given a number of great Scots words by friends who had come across them. I did already know that ‘skulduggery’ goes back to a Scottish word (skulduddery), for instance, but the friend who offered me that also presented me with ‘mool,’ this being described as ‘dirt from or intended for a grave.’ (No, I didn’t ask them how they happened to know this …)
I also began to make the acquaintance of real, live Scots (VERY exciting!), who were naturally a valuable source of information. I think I got ‘bidie-in’ (though I didn’t use it in Outlander) from Val McDermid, and my long-time friend and fellow author, Jack Whyte (may he rest in peace with a six-olive dirty martini in his hand), who wrote books about post-Roman Britain and the European Middle Ages, but who was born in Motherwell and well-equipped with idioms, and who gave me any number of useful bits.
I wanted, naturally, to be able to give a sense of authenticity to the way people spoke in my book – and that (given that most of it was taking place in the Highlands of the eighteenth century) meant that I required a few Gaelic (Gaidhlig) words and expressions, as well.
Scots and Gaelic are Not The Same Thing. At all.
I neither read nor speak in Gaidhlig – but I know people who do (thank God), and who have been endlessly helpful in providing me with suitable things with which to scatter my prose in the interests of authenticity (and also, keeping the language visible and vital).
My very great thanks to Luath and the Dictionaries of the Scots Language for providing this useful volume of Scots words from the Outlander book series, and I hope it will also further interest in the language and people and land of Scotland.
Yours aye
Diana Gabaldon
Scottsdale, Arizona
[1] People always ask me whether I majored in English or History. Well…neither. I have a B.S. degree in Zoology, an M.S. in Marine Biology, and a Ph.D. in <deep breath> Quantitative Behavioral Ecology (it’s just animal behavior with a lot of statistics, don’t worry about it). The nice thing about being a writer is that they don’t make you get a license to do it.
[2] That is, by the way, the sum total of useful information obtained from three years of college English and Literature classes. I’m sure the fault was mine.